How Did Humans Discover Uranium?

In 1530, a silver miner in Bohemia threw a heavy black stone onto the waste heap. Four hundred years later, that same stone helped end a war. And somewhere in an antique shop right now, a piece of green glass colored by the same element is glowing under ultraviolet light. For centuries, uranium was a worthless "bad luck" rock, then a pretty color for glass. Meanwhile, the miners who dug it kept dying of a disease nobody could explain. So how did humans actually discover it? What You Will Learn in This Video: The Cursed Rock: How pitchblende came out of the silver mines of Joachimsthal, the town whose coins gave us the word "dollar," and why miners threw it away. The Planet's Namesake: How Martin Klaproth named uranium after Uranus in 1789, and why it took until 1841 for anyone to hold the real metal. A Color, Not a Weapon: Vaseline glass, orange glazes, and Fiesta dinnerware that glowed under ultraviolet light. The Drawer and the Shed: How Henri Becquerel found radioactivity in a dark drawer in 1896, and how Marie and Pierre Curie boiled tons of mine waste to find polonium and radium. The Clock for the Earth: How radioactive decay turned a black stone into a way to measure the planet's age. The Walk in the Snow: How Meitner, Frisch, Hahn and Strassmann discovered fission, and why the credit is still argued over. The Oklo Reactor: The natural nuclear reactor in Gabon that ran about 1.7 billion years ago, long before there were humans. If you enjoy animated deep dives into ancient discoveries, dangerous materials, and the strange history of science, hit the like button, subscribe, and drop a comment telling me what to break down next! Click here to Subscribe : #uranium #historydocumentary #nuclearphysics #mariecurie #chemistry #sciencehistory #curiosity